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Johansen (2021) Good friend or good student? An interview study of perceived conflicts between personal and academic integrity among students in three European countries,

Abstract. The most common way of studying explanations in philosophy of science and science education is through case studies. Recently these have been supplemented with studies based on empirical methods. This chapter provides an empirical method for collecting and comparing exemplar explanations across scientific disciplines with the aim of exposing possible qualitative differences between them. The method is based on the use of science textbooks as sources of explanations. I discuss a number of possible strategies for identifying explanations in these sources, and specify a set of reliable linguistic indicators that can be used for this purpose. A pilot study is presented to illustrate the method and its limitations.

Plagiarism and other transgressions of the norms of academic integrity appear to be a persistent problem among upper secondary students. Numerous surveys have revealed high levels of infringement of what appear to be clearly stated rules. Less attention has been given to students’ understanding of academic integrity, and to the potential misconceptions and false beliefs that may make it difficult for them to comply with existing rules and handle complex real-life situations.In this paper we report findings from a survey of European upper secondary students’ views on issues relating to academic integrity. We relate these findings to the students’ training about academic integrity, self-reported level of questionable behavior and country of study.A total of 1654 students at 51 institutions located in 6 European countries participated in the study. The participants generally believed they had a good understanding of the rules applying to them and knew how to behave in compliance with norms of academic integrity. The results indicate, however, that often, in practice, this belief was mistaken. Many students had an inadequate understanding of core elements of academic integrity. They were uncertain about how to act, and they struggled in the handling of complex situations that require context-sensitive judgement. While some differences between countries were identified, they were modest and exhibited no clear pattern. Our results also suggest that reducing students’ level of uncertainty and, to a lesser degree, improving their level of knowledge could lead them to engage less in certain types of questionable behaviours. Surprisingly, the effect of academic training is modest and ambiguous. The study also confirms that perception of peer behaviour has the strongest association with student engagement in questionable behaviours. Thus, academic integrity at the upper secondary level cannot be explained simply in terms of individual ethics or knowledge.

More and more research institutions are implementing courses in research integrity (RI). Recent studies indicate that teachers of RI courses are increasingly adopting a “phronetic” approach to their teaching, where the focus is on nurturing values and practical wisdom—what Aristotle called phronesis. When adopting a phronetic approach, it is important to understand what phronesis in relation to RI entails and how and to what extent an RI course can contribute to the development of research phronesis. This paper contains a practice-based discussion of the realistic aims of RI courses and a first step towards a specification of the skill set necessary for developing research phronesis drawing on experiences from the PhD courses on Responsible Conduct of Research at the University of Copenhagen. We discuss the limited extent to which research phronesis can be taught in short courses and examine the broader implications of this for the role of RI courses in the training of good researchers.